The Practice of Communicative Teaching

138 Rosamond Mitchell and Richard Johnstone coursebook units observed. Imperfect, pluperfect and future tense forms hardly appeared at all however; the teacher consistently expressed future time by means of the 'aller + infinitive' construction. Past participles occurring alone were almost totally confined to her frequent use of a single one-word question: 'Fini?'. As well as being the most frequently used tense, the present tense appeared in the widest range of forms. First, second and third person singular present tense forms occurred in the 'active' coursebook syllabus, as did 'vous' forms, and this fact boosted their respective frequencies in the teacher's speech. But her regular use of 'on' and marginal introduction of the third person plural anticipated Tour de France Stage 2, as did the introduction of perfect tense forms other than the first person singular. Apart from some shifting in relative frequency between the three most common categories (imperative, present tense and impersonal forms), no significant development can be detected after Lesson 5 on this table, either with respect to the introduction of new moods or tenses, or the extension of the range of forms used within each. This tends to confirm the picture of highly interactive, here-and-now FL talk suggested in the previous section in relation to the pattern of pedagogic activities. In other ways the pattern of morphological frequencies seemed adapted not only to the classroom setting but also, perhaps, to the teacher's perceptions of 'difficulty'. Teacher self-censorship seemed the most plausible explanation for the complete absence of 'nous' forms, for example, and of all subjunctive forms. (b) Functional differentiation in language choice It was clear from inspection of the lesson transcripts that although the teacher spoke a great deal of French with her pupils, her use of English was not confined to that subset of pedagogic activities which were 'officially' English-medium. This 'survival' of English in her classroom talk required explanation, in view of her clear commitment to the goal of making the target language the classroom communicative norm. Could specific discourse functions be identified, whose realization in French caused particular difficulties for the teacher? Or was English being used randomly from time to time, to perform functions realized at other times in French? (This latter possibility appeared to represent the greater potential threat to the stability of French usage for classroom communication.) In order to answer these questions the teacher's use of English was examined more closely. Table 6 shows the number of teacher speech turns in the seven-lesson subsample discussed in the previous section. The number and percentage of speech turns containing at least some

The Routinization of 'Communicative' Methodology 139 TABLE 6. Analysis of teacher speech turns Teacher speech turns Lesson no. All-FL Including LI Total 1 no. 216 125 341 percentage 63.3 36.7 100.0 5 no. 222 144 366 percentage 60.7 39.3 100.0 10 no. 154 144 298 percentage 51.7 48.3 100.0 15 no. 420 63 483 percentage 87.0 13.0 100.0 20 no. 291 108 399 percentage 72.9 27.1 100.0 25 no. 301 96 397 percentage 75.8 24.2 100.0 29 no. 261 97 358 percentage 72.9 27.1 100.0 Total 1865 777 2624 Percentage 70.6 29.4 100.0 TABLE 7. Distribution of T turns including LI within lessons LI turns in FL activities LI turns in PFL 'mixed' CFL and other Total Lesson no. LI activities activities PFL activities LI turns 1 42 5 (3 activities) - 83 125 22 (16 activities) (19 activities) 10 - (1 activity) 122 144 15 - 49 (20 activities) (21 activities) 20 - (2 activities) 95 144 25 11 - (4 activities) (7 activities) 29 (1 activity) 55 63 63 12 (4 activities) (14 activities) (14 activities) (2 activities) 53 108 44 (10 activities) (14 activities) (2 activities) 85 96 (11 activities) (12 activities) 41 97 (7 activities) (11 activities) Total 65 170 542 111 Percentage (6 activities) (9 activities) (83 activities) (98 activities) 8.4 21.9 69.8 100.0

140 Rosamond Mitchell and Richard Johnstone English is shown. While these all - or part-English speech turns approached 50 per cent in only one lesson (one including a major test), and settled below 30 per cent from Lesson 15 onwards, the amount of English spoken by the teacher was clearly never reduced to negligible proportions. Table 7 shows the distribution of the 777 all/part-English teacher speech turns in this seven-lesson subsample according to the type of activity in which they occurred. Out of the 98 teaching/learning activities in these lessons, six were completely English-medium; however, these accounted for only 8.4 per cent of the teacher's English speech turns. The rest occurred in the course of activities which were predominantly FL-medium (whether 'practice' or 'communicative'). These English speech turns were far from occurring randomly in the 92 officially FL-medium activities, however. Firstly, a group of practice FL activities was identified, in which the teacher used English systematic­ ally for some discourse function integral to the accomplishment of the task. Shown in the table as practice FL 'mixed-language' activities, these consisted largely of listening and reading comprehension activi­ ties, in which the teacher used English consistently to give or to confirm meanings of FL texts; vocabulary checks; and spelling activities (in which English was regularly used to evaluate performance). These 'mixed-language' activities accounted for a further 21.9 per cent of the teacher's English speech turns. The remaining all/part-English speech turns did occur more irregu­ larly, scattered through activities for which French was the intended spoken norm. On inspection, it turned out that these remaining English utterances had also mostly been used for a distinctive (though non- task-specific) set of discourse functions. Firstly, English was frequently used by the teacher at times of perceived comprehension difficulty (along with other, FL-medium communication strategies). Overall, the commonest type of English communication/repair strategy was the language switch — where a French phrase was immediately 'echoed' in English, as in the following example: Attends un moment, attends un moment. Wait a minute, hold on. (Lesson 29) Use of this language switching strategy, however, decreased with time, from a peak of 44 instances in Lesson 10 to seven in Lesson 29. Other, more elaborate part or all-English communication strategies were almost equally common:

The Routinization of 'Communicative' Methodology 141 T: Tu n'en as pas besoin. What do you think I'm saying, Tu n'en as pas besoin'? P: It doesn't matter P: You don't need it T: Oui, c'est ga, you don't need it (Lesson 15) Secondly, in activities of all kinds, a strong tendency was apparent for 'activity instructions' (teacher utterances which tell the pupils what is going to happen next) to be given in English. This emerges clearly from Table 8, which shows the language used for this discourse function throughout the seven-lesson subsample, regardless of activity type. Activity instructions were given in French alone on only 17 occasions, a figure hardly greater than that for activities launched without any explicit instructions at all. TABLE 8. Language of activity instructions Language of activity instructions ————————b—y —ac—t—iv—ity————————Total no. of Lesson no. FL FL/L1 LI 0 activities 1 1 3 11 4 19 5 _3 2 13 3 21 10 41 2 7 15 5 7 1 1 14 20 4 4 5 1 14 25 2 4 4 2 12 29 2 2 6 1 11 Total 17 26 41 14 98 Between them, activity instructions and communication strategies accounted for considerably more than half the teacher's English utterances during FL-dominant activities. Half a dozen other discourse management functions accounted for almost all the remainder. These were discourse moves intended to modify an ongoing activity, to elicit responses from pupils, to respond to an unsolicited pupil question or comment, and to discipline deviant behaviour. With the exception of comments on points of grammar, which were consistently given in English, all these move types were regularly expressed in French also (some, such as 'eliciting' moves, more commonly so). Some other move types (notably the very common 'organizational instructions', to do with materials, seating, etc.) were hardly ever expressed in English, having apparently become decisively identified with French. Overview of teacher talk This teacher sustained a consistent pattern of extensive but not exclusive FL use in her own classroom talk throughout the 30 weeks of

142 Rosamond Mitchell and Richard Johnstone the study. Her French was linguistically more complex than the coursebook syllabus, though it was clearly a simplified register, on whose structure the coursebook syllabus had some influence. There was some indication that the elaboration of this register was a stepped rather than a continuous process; after a rapid initial phase of 'complexification' the structural development of the teacher's FL talk slowed down, and the range of FL forms in use was much the same from about Lesson 15 until the end of the study. English retained a regular, though minor, place in the teacher's classroom talk throughout. Most notably, it was her first choice for two essential discourse functions: ensuring that participants in teaching/ learning activities knew what was happening next (activity instruc­ tions), and ensuring that comprehension was sustained (communi­ cation strategies). These functions were only exceptionally performed in French; even when they were, there was no directional pattern suggesting that any general shift to French for such purposes was imminent. While a few teachers observed during an earlier phase of the project had been seen to use French more extensively than this, the quantity of 'comprehensible input' provided by this teacher for her pupils in her own classroom talk was still substantial. Functional differentiation between the use of LI and FL, with English in regular use for certain purposes but hardly encroaching at all into many others, seems on this evidence a viable pattern for sustaining extensive classroom FL use in the longer term, without imposing intolerable stresses on the teacher or her pupils. Conclusion The evidence gathered during this longitudinal case study suggests that this teacher had found a robust, practical pattern of instruction, well adapted to the particular 'personality' of her 1982-83 SI class, and sustainable without massive inroads into her out-of-class preparation time. In overall lesson planning the changes were rung on a fairly small set of proven activities; ease of organization was assured through the almost exclusive use of off-the-shelf materials and straightforward seating plans. Nonetheless this 'routinized' pattern conserved many features first seen in more consciously 'innovative' lessons, and offered the pupils substantial experience of communicative FL use. While English played a regular role in the running of these lessons, the scale of English use was controlled through stable functional differentiation between the two languages, and even in the latest lessons in the series there was no sign of English encroachment on FL discourse 'territory'. Could this teacher have used French even more extensively over this

The Routinization of 'Communicative' Methodology 143 period of time, excluding English altogether from her own classroom talk? Could the planned 'communicative reading' strand have been successfully integrated into the overall pattern? Could the pupils have taken more responsibility for their own learning, in more complex group or individual organizational patterns? Such questions point to the desirability of further case studies, investigating a range of solutions to the problem of providing classroom experience of communi­ cative FL use. But even this single study provides considerable encouragement as to the viability of a 'communicative approach' under something approaching normal, everyday classroom conditions. The research study described in this paper was funded by the Scottish Education Department. Notes 1. Paper presented to the Seventh World Congress of Applied Linguistics, Brussels, August 1984. References Mitchell, R. (1982). The FL teacher as communicator: some Scottish evidence. Compass: Journal of the Irish Association for Curriculum Development 11(2), 33-41. Mitchell, R. (1983a). The teacher's use of LI and FL as means of communication in the FL classroom. In: C. Brumfit, (ed.), Learning and Teaching Languages for Communication: Applied Linguistic Perspectives. London: CILT, pp. 41-58. Mitchell, R. (1983b). Coping with communication. Modern Languages in Scotland, 24, 76-86. Mitchell, R. (1985) Communicative Interaction Research Project: Final Report. Depart­ ment of Education, University of Stirling. Mitchell, R., Parkinson, B. and Johnstone, R. (1981). The Foreign Language Classroom: An Observational Study. Stirling Educational Monographs no. 9. Department of Education, University of Stirling. Parkinson, B., Mclntyre, D. I., and Mitchell, R. (1982). An Independent Evaluation of 'Tour de France'. Stirling Educational Monographs no. 11. Department of Education, University of Stirling. Scottish Central Committee on Modern Languages (1982). Tour de France, Stage 1. London: Heinemann Educational Books.



Notes on Contributors Patrick Alien is an associate professor in the Modern Language Centre at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Before moving to Canada in 1976 he taught ESL and applied linguistics in Scotland, Pakistan and West Africa. His interests include general linguistics, sociolinguistics, and all aspects of English-language teaching. He has written, edited or contributed to twelve books, and has published extensively in professional journals. Christopher Brumfit is Professor of Education at the University of Southampton and general editor of ELT Documents. Richard Johnstone is concerned with modern languages in the Education Department, University of Stirling. Alan Maley has worked with the British Council since 1962 as English Language Officer in Yugoslavia, Ghana, Italy, France and China. He is now responsible for coordinating British Council English Studies programmes in India. He has published over twenty books on English language teaching, including The Mind's Eye, Drama Techniques in Language Learning, and Poem into Poem. Rosamond Mitchell has worked for ten years on research projects related to language teaching at the University of Stirling, and is now in the Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. J. T. Roberts is in the Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex. He is co-author of An Introduction to Language and Language Teaching and a former secretary of the British Association for Applied Linguistics. Dawei Wang has been a teacher of English at the Maritime Institute of Shanghai, China, for the past few years. Recently he has studied applied linguistics at the University of Essex. H. G. Widdowson is professor in the ESOL Department, University of London Institute of Education. He is the author of many books on literature, ESP and communicative language teaching and was until recently editor of Applied Linguistics. Janice Yalden is Professor of Linguistics at Carleton University, Ottawa, where she was founding Director of the Centre for Applied Language Studies. During her career she has had responsibilities in both modern language and ESL teaching, in teacher training, in language programme design and evaluation, and in applied linguistics. She has also designed course materials in several languages. She is the author of The Communicative Syllabus (Pergamon Press, 1983). 145



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